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Literature Compass 10/6 (2013): 473–482, 10.1111/lic3.12067

Re-thinking American Exceptionalism

Elizabeth Duquette*Gettysburg College

AbstractAmerican exceptionalism has been an organizing concept in American literary and cultural studies fordecades, but recent years have witnessed the proliferation of new approaches to this topic. After anintroduction to the history of American exceptionalism, the essay traces the arguments of severalkey figures in this debate, especially Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben, in order to provide anintroduction to the utility of their claims for literary scholars.

American exceptionalism is a set of loosely related propositions that collectively assert theunique nature of the United States, its exemption from the historical forces that buffet therest of the world. Gesturing to what the United States lacks – most notably, a feudal pastand a robust socialist or Marxist tradition – exceptionalist ideology maintains that the problemsand paradigms that exist elsewhere are not germane to the United States. It has justifiedterritorial expansion, authorized intervention in foreign wars and the domestic affairs ofsovereign nations, and vigorously, sometimes aggressively, promoted free market capitalism.For individuals, exceptionalism takes the shape of the American Dream, promising thepossibility of individual self-determination and prosperity, freedom from the rigid classconstraints seen in other cultures, and the opportunity to worship and speak without fearof reprisal. The peculiar durability of American exceptionalism derives from the allure ofits message and its success in organizing disparate, even contradictory, assumptions aboutthe nation and its citizens. It allows the United States to position itself simultaneously asa model for other nations while positing that it is unlike them in its fundamental valuesand structures.Although exceptionalist thinking draws on historical events, it is best explained through its

successful correlation of ideology, myth, and history. Each of these slippery terms denotes, atleast in part, a relationship to time, particularly the movement between past, present, andfuture. If one of the aims of history is to put past events into an order with meaning, itsfundamental impulses overlap with myth and ideology; but whereas history is grounded,in part, by its commitment to evidence and fact, myth and ideology force these same factsto fit into a narrative that has an already determined conclusion.1 “It is not by its history thatthe mythology of a nation is determined,” Ernst Cassirer famously noted, “its history isdetermined by its mythology” (5). In other words, the mythic narratives that emerge todistinguish a people likewise inform the priorities and principles that determine which factsor events are included in their history.2 Exceptionalism is an organizing myth for Americanculture, one that has a long tradition. This essay will briefly sketch that history, before turningto new ways, and alternate traditions, which scholars are using to challenge and reviseAmerica’s mythic exceptionalism.Although it draws on historical events, trends, and ideas – Puritan theology and the

concept of election, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the Monroedoctrine and manifest destiny, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, American military intervention

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in World Wars I and II; and the “victory” over communism – American exceptionalism didnot coalesce into a coherent narrative until the 20th century. This is not to suggest that earlierwriters and thinkers did not assert that Americans had distinct characteristics, they did.3 InDemocracy in America, for example, French writer Alexis de Tocqueville uses the term“exceptional” to describe the “position of the Americans.” But, as historian Dorothy Rossexplains, Tocqueville’s formulation is not “ideological” in that it does not assert that theprinciple of democracy is “essentially American” (24). The “exceptional” “position of theAmericans” has to do with a set of contingent historical and geographical conditions thathave been particularly fortuitous, but Tocqueville still “cannot consent to separate Americafrom Europe” (2: 36). “Let us cease,” he concludes, “to view all democratic nations underthe example of the American people” (2: 37).4 The spatial dimension of Tocqueville’s phraseis telling: it is a mistake to put other nations “under” the United States. Yet the actual contentof Tocqueville’s text, Democracy in America has come to be “revered as the archive in whichare preserved the United States’ core metasocial significations” (Pease, 112). The dominantreading of Tocqueville is exceptionalist, and as such, it suppresses alternate interpretationsto protect what can be imagined as Tocqueville’s original observation of the early years ofthe United States.The emphasis on the unique nature of American experience that some readers find in

Tocqueville reached undisputed prominence in the 20th century. Delivered on the eve ofthe 20th century, Frederick Jackson Turner’s “The Significance of the Frontier inAmerican History” (1893) is a key text in the evolution of American exceptionalism as a“controlling theme” in the history of writing of the United States and presents a fineintroduction to its key moves (Rodgers, 21). Presented to the American Historical Associationin Chicago, Turner’s thesis linked the “striking characteristics” of the “American intellect” tothe ability to “begi[n] over again on the frontier” (566, 545). Of particular interest to Turnerwas how the frontier differentiated American and European experience: “the advance of thefrontier has meant a steady movement away from Europe,” he wrote,

a steady growth of independence on American lines. So to study this advance, the men who grewup under these conditions, and the political, economic, and social results of it, is to study the reallyAmerican part of our history (546).

For this reason, Turner thinks the fact of the frontier is far more important than the legacyof slavery, dismissed as just “an incident” in the American narrative (558). Turner’s argumentestablishes a link between geography and character; fundamentally masculinist, the Americanself is rejuvenated by contact with, and domination over, primitive peoples and the landitself.Building from Turner’s example, 20th-century scholars increasingly focused on the

distinct characteristics of “the American way of life” (Denning), and by the 1940s, exception-alism had acquired the status of an unquestioned “given” (Rodgers, 26). Scholars “steeped inexceptionalist convictions” would search the text or archive in a manner Donald Pease haslikened to “a romance quest,” in order to “understand the meaning of their “American”identity through the uncovering of the special significance of the nation’s institutions”(2009, 12). Like Turner, these scholars were interested in what it meant to be American –the special meaning of American character, practices, and institutions – and theypursued their objects in multiple disciplines, including history, literature, sociology, politicaltheory, and the emergent field of American studies. Indeed, “the notion of ‘Americanexceptionalism’ is in many ways the foundation of the ‘discipline’ of ‘American Studies’ ”(Denning, 360).

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But, not only did the emphasis on American uniqueness display a “smug conceit of moralsuperiority” (Greene, 208), it also prevented “the emergence of a more general ‘cultural studies,’”in part by ignoring “non-American theoretical paradigms” (Denning, 360). From itsdisciplinary inception, American Studies has been politically invested, and the cold war climateled scholars to think of their work as crucial to an eventual American victory. The “best safeguardagainst totalitarian developments in our society,” Charles Seymour, president of Yale, claimedin 1950, “is an understanding of our own cultural heritage and an affirmative belief in the validityof our institutions of freedom, enterprise and individual liberty” (cited Davis, 355). Exceptional-ism supplied, in other words, the American response to Marxism and communism. (Yet,ironically, the phrase “American exceptionalism” was coined by Joseph Stalin in the 1920s toaccuse a faction of the American Communist Party of heresy.5)While scholars in other countrieswere drawing key insights fromMarx’s philosophy of history and his investment in materialism,researchers in the fields surrounding American Studies were reluctant to follow, resulting in whatRobert Sklar dubbed “the poverty of theory in American Studies” (260).6 The emphasis onexceptionalism and consensus was displaced in the early 1970s, however, as interest in questionsof gender, ethnicity, race and class increasingly drew attention. Even though some scholarsworried about the loss of a synthetic narrative, the turn away from exceptionalism and its narrowfocus on a limited range of experience (white, male, Protestant, heterosexual) has expanded thecanon and proliferated methodological approaches.But this is not to suggest that exceptionalism is no longer important to the study of

American culture, history, and literature. If “[n]otions of American exceptionalism cut usoff from [a] larger understanding of ourselves and our place in the world as a nation amongnations, a people among peoples,” producing “an odd combination of parochialism andarrogance,” the disorienting experience of 9/11 and “The War on Terror” have broughtnew energy to the critique of exceptionalism, re-energized by the same events (Bender, 300).Resituating the United States in the world has led to a re-mapping of American literature, arethinking of translation in literary studies, and a new orientation to the hemisphere and theglobe. Rather than explicate a distinctive American character, studies are now attuned to themultiple versions of American-ness that exist simultaneously.At the same time, and particularly in the wake of 9/11, a new way of thinking about

exceptionalism has emerged, one critical of existing arguments and their strategies. Althoughthere have always been critics to the coercive consensus on which exceptionalism insisted –Edmund Wilson’s polemical preface to Patriotic Gore (1962) provides a particularly insightfulexample – recent events have raised questions about American arrogance and the largerimplications of what it means to claim the position of exception.7 But where previousarguments focused on overlooked historical details or cultural artifacts, newer approachesto exceptionalism employ different methodological premises and draw on new archives.Rather than focusing on American character or the peculiarities of American culture, recentarguments about exceptionalism pose questions about the nature of the exception in legaland political theory, raising concerns about the nature of sovereignty and the rule of law.To think through these issues, scholars increasingly rely on the work of continentalphilosophers and political theorists. The studies that result tend to be more critical ofAmerican policies than earlier arguments about the American exceptionalism. Because thearguments draw from sources that may be unfamiliar to many literary scholars, this essay willsurvey the central claims about the exception for four thinkers who are especially importantto the larger debate: Søren Kierkegaard, Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, and GiorgioAgamben. Although most of them do not address the United States directly in their texts,their ideas are crucial to the project of rethinking American exceptionalism, providing analternate genealogy for the concept.



This intellectual trajectory begins with Søren Kierkegaard, a 19th-century Danishphilosopher whose theological writings are cited less frequently in discussions of the exceptionthan they should be, given the precision and influence of his claims. Kierkegaard’sextensive pseudonymous writings explore the nature of faith and the individual’s affectiveresponse – anxiety – to its demands and rewards. In two of his most accessible texts, Repetitionand Fear and Trembling (both 1843), Kierkegaard charts the central role of the exception inaesthetic and religious experience. In both cases, the exception disrupts the universality ofethical society, installing in its place a rigorous singularity with expansive implications.Fear and Trembling is a meditation on Genesis 22: 1–18 in which God orders Abraham to

sacrifice his beloved son, Isaac. Abraham prepares to comply, but at the last moment, Godintervenes, praising Abraham for his unwavering faith. Enlightenment philosophers struggledwith this story, which seemed to depict God as capriciously cruel, faith as irreconcilable withreason; thinkers, like Immanuel Kant, were eager to explain, or even explain away, theparable’s message. But Kierkegaard objects to the idea that the story of Abraham should beignored, arguing instead that it provides an unparalleled means of appreciating that faithshould never be seen as a mere matter of thought.Across his writings, Kierkegaard instead stresses the relationship between absurdity and

faith. For this reason, he explains that it is a mistake to attempt to “think [one]self intoAbraham” (33) because the patriarch’s actions defy reason. “[W]e are unwilling to work,and yet we want to understand the story,” Johannes de Silentio, the narrator of Fear andTrembling, observes. “We glorify Abraham, but how? We recite the whole story in clichés”(28). So presented, the story seems easy to comprehend, and an auditor can “stretch outhis legs,” relaxing in its moral clarity (28). But such readings are dangerous, he continues,because Abraham is a “knight of faith,” not a “tragic hero” (75). The “tragic hero” makessacrifices that “express the universal,” which demonstrate the values a community shares(75). The “knight of faith” does the opposite: he “relinquishes the universal to become thesingle individual” (75). Put differently, the man of faith renounces the shared obligationsand privileges of the group, a “teleological suspension of the ethical,” to attain a privateand singular relationship with God. He thus becomes an exception, who can never be amoral model because, when taken literally, Abraham’s story is morally reprehensible.The ideas in Repetition run parallel to those expressed in Fear and Trembling. The text is

narrated by a second pseudonym, Constantin Constantius, and tells a partially autobiographicaltale of young poet’s ordeal as he relinquishes his beloved. Here, as in its companion text,Kierkegaard raises questions about the nature of communication, arguing explicitly forindirection as a way to express ideas and principles that fit uneasily into language. What is mostcrucial for this essay, however, is the description he provides of the exception. “On the oneside,” he writes,

stands the exception, on the other the universal, and the struggle itself is a strange conflictbetween the rage and impatience of the universal over the disturbance the exception causesand its infatuated partiality for the exception, for after all is said and done, just as heaven rejoicesmore over a sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous, so does the universal rejoiceover an exception (226).

Characterized as “a wrestling match,”Kierkegaard presents the relationship of the “universal”and “the exception” as one predicated on “conflict” and “distress” (227). There are two keypoints to note. First, Kierkegaard’s exception is a person, not a place, epoch, or condition.The dynamic relationship between the exception and the universal is saturated with affect(infatuation, joy, “rage,” “impatience”). Nonetheless, Kierkegaard concludes “if one really



wants to study the universal, one only needs to look around for a legitimate exception; hediscloses everything far more clearly than the universal itself” (227).Kierkegaard was not translated into English until the 20th century, but his writings were

familiar to German thinkers much earlier. Carl Schmitt, a controversial legal scholar fromthe early 20th century, cites Kierkegaard early in one of his key works, Political Theology(1922), praising his predecessor’s “vital intensity” and deploying Kierkegaard’s authority tobuttress his own argument (15).8 It is no surprise that Schmitt would draw from a religiousthinker in Political Theology for he argues that the key concepts of modern state theory are“secularized theological” ones (36). This is true not only because of their “historical develop-ment” but also because of their “systematic structure” (36). “The exception in jurisprudenceis analogous to the miracle in theology,” he concludes (36). For Schmitt, as for Kierkegaardbefore him, the exception provides unique access to larger systems or structures. In PoliticalTheology, Schmitt states that the exception illuminates the concept of sovereignty, beginningthe volume with the claim “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception” (5). It is neithersocial contract nor divine authority that subtends sovereignty according to Schmitt, butinstead, the decision to suspend the law and establish its exception. He is careful to explain thatthis is not merely a declaration – “The very idea of decision precludes that there can be anyabsolutely declaratory decisions” – because of his consistent opposition to the emphasis placedon words – deliberation and discourse – in the evolution of political theory.In The Concept of the Political (1927/1932), Schmitt argues for a second key element of his

political theory: the fundamental political distinction is between the friend and the enemy.No mere metaphor, the friend–enemy dyad must be understood, he explains, as “concreteand existential” and as having the possibility of reaching “the most extreme point”(CP, 27). “War is neither the aim nor the purpose nor even the very content of politics,”he continues, but without its possibility, the political cannot exist (CP, 34). Schmitt arguesthat what gets lost in the turn to liberal democracy, with its defense of individual rightsand reliance on parliamentary procedure, is recognition of this fundamental fact. Byemphasizing discussion and debate, rather than decision, liberal democracy mistakes the verynature of politics; it is, in part, the function of the sovereign to nullify such errors. Evenfurther, Schmitt maintains that “every consistent individualism” leads not only to a “negationof the political” but also, more importantly, to “a political practice of distrust toward allconceivable political forces” (CP, 70). Juxtaposed against one of Turner’s claims – on thefrontier “[t]he tax-gatherer is viewed as a representative of oppression” (562) – it becomesclearer why Schmitt’s ideas have garnered so much interest in recent years. Commitment tothe principles of liberal democracy, with its emphasis on rights, equality, and deliberation isfundamentally incompatible with what Schmitt argues is basic to politics, namely homogeneityand the dyad of friend/enemy. Across his oeuvre, Schmitt develops a nuanced argument aboutthe nature of sovereignty and a thorough critique of liberal, parliamentary democracy, ideas thathave drawn attention from a wide range of thinkers, including Jürgen Habermas, JacquesDerrida, Chantal Mouffe, and Agamben. But Schmitt’s influence is controversial because hewas a member of the Nazi Party from 1933, wrote essays about the Führer, enjoyed theprotection of Herman Göring, and held a post at the University of Berlin throughout WWII;his wartime activities caused him to be interrogated at Nuremberg. Some scholars have worriedabout the influence of a Nazi jurist, while others suggest that the accuracy of Schmitt’sarguments about the fate of the liberal democratic state should be the greater source of concern.Given the history of the Third Reich, it has been difficult for scholars to understand the

relationship between Schmitt, a member of the Nazi Party, and Walter Benjamin, a GermanJewish intellectual who committed suicide in Spain during WWII, fearful of falling into Nazihands. While it would be wrong to overstate the extent of their influence on one another, it



is clear that they were familiar with, and admired, each other’s work. In “Theses on thePhilosophy of History” (1940), Benjamin briefly engages with the problem of the exception,gesturing to Schmitt.9 “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’in which we live is not the exception but the rule,” he writes in the eighth thesis (257). Here,as in elsewhere in his writings, Benjamin is deeply critical of the idea that history isprogressive, constantly improving. If Schmitt had linked sovereignty to the possibility ofclaiming a state of exception, Benjamin’s position is that it has become the norm. Buildingfrom his earlier work on the baroque theater, in which he argues for the fundamentalrelationship between the sovereign and history, Benjamin here indicates the urgency associatedwith thinking about the exception. Only when people recognize the limitations of their habitsof thought about history will it be possible to fight back against Fascism, he explains.

The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentiethcentury is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge – unless it isknowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable (257).

Unfortunately Benjamin did not live to develop fully the alternate theory of history atwhich he gestures; scholars have gleaned from his works, however, an idea of messianic timethat productively shatters conventions.Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, has engaged with the concept of the exception

across a series of (to date) five books.10 Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life is the bestknown, in part because because it controversially posits “it is not the city but rather the[concentration] camp that is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West” (HS, 181).While some scholars have been repelled by Agamben’s claim, questioning the propriety oftaking the concentration camp as an example, others have lauded the precision of his arguments.These controversies notwithstanding, Homo Sacer, along with State of Exception, is central to theevolution of current debates about the exception, and Agamben’s dense texts have beenimportant to scholars seeking new paradigms of and for American exceptionalism as well asnew forms of activism in political debates. As with the other thinkers surveyed, Agambenestablishes a fundamental connection between sovereignty and the exception, figured in hiswork by the homo sacer. Without an original elaboration of principles of inclusion andexclusion – what he calls a ban – Agamben argues that a “sovereign sphere” would beimpossible (HS, 83, italics in the original). Although many political theorists point to adiscourse of rights to define the constituting power of a state, Agemben maintains that itis only through the state of exception, and the sovereign ban it allows, that the state cancome into existence.The difficulty of his prose makes Agamben’s central claims hard to grasp, but his

methodology is not as alien as it might initially seem. Agamben is explicit about his debts toboth Michel Foucault and Walter Benjamin. From Foucault, Agamben develops a methodbased on philological archaeology and the paradigm. The most famous paradigm from theFoucauldian canon is Bentham’s Panopticon inDiscipline and Punish (1977), where Foucaultdetails the multiple ways in which this representative example makes visible the deepstructures of its historical moment. Agamben adapts this way of understanding the kind ofwork the paradigm can do in his own work, particularly in his analysis of the concentrationcamp. Agamben shares with Benjamin an interest in historical materialism. Like Benjamin,Agamben vigorously opposes the view that history is progressive. The influence ofBenjamin’s thought is evident across Agamben’s work, and State of Exception devotes anentire section to elaborating the relationship between the exception and “pure” violencein Benjamin’s work, especially “The Critique of Violence.”



In Homo Sacer, Agamben’s argument depends on several terms excavated from Greek andRoman antiquity. He begins by pointing out that the Greeks had two terms to refer to life:zoe and bios. While zoe designated “the simple fact of living common to all living beings,” biosindicated “the form or way of living proper to an individual or group” (HS, 1). Thisdistinction is key to Agamben’s revision to the definition of “biopolitics,” the term Foucaultcoined to refer to the modern state’s techniques of intervention into the lives of its citizens.According to Agamben, Foucault’s focus on the modern state overlooked a basicfact: biopolitics already existed in the classical world, as the distinction between zoe and biosmakes clear.But it is with the idea of the homo sacer that Agamben’s biopolitical argument becomes

most clear. In archaic Roman law, homo sacer designated an individual who could be killedwith impunity, because he stood outside the law, but could not be sacrificed, as he no longerhad any value to the society (HS, 8). As we saw in the discussion of Fear and Trembling,sacrifice requires giving up something or someone of great value. The homo sacer suffers froma “double exclusion” (HS, 82); neither part of the state (he has been stripped of everythingbut bare life) nor free from its power (because he can be killed with impunity, he lives undera constant threat of death), homo sacer is “captured” in the state of exception (HS, 83).Although this particular legal category no longer exists, Agamben argues that the homo sacer,like the camp, is paradigmatic of the state of exception, which he points out has becomeincreasingly expansive, both in terms of time and space. In the camp, the exception is therule, and Agamben posits that this has troubling implications for our contemporary historicalmoment. He does not go as far as some – Slavoj Zizek asserted in 2002 that “we are all homosacer” (100) – but Agamben is also not willing to relinquish the idea that “perhaps” thismight be “virtually” the case (HS, 115). “From the real state of exception in which we live,”he asserts at the end of State of Exception, “it is not possible to return to the state of law, for atissue now are the very concepts of ‘state’ and ‘law’ (SE, 87).” As dire as his account of currentconditions are, however, Agamben’s aim is to energize readers into a new politics, one heglimpses in the example of a fictional character – Herman Melville’s famous scrivener,Bartleby – where the ability to resist and reject exceptional traps created by sovereignty,power, law, and violence might become possible.But for the final gesture to Herman Melville, it might appear that these works have little to

offer literary scholars, and it is entirely reasonable to ask how scholars use arguments likethese to re-think American exceptionalism and its place in literary scholarship. Further,how might this intellectual tradition overlap with the overview of American exceptionalismideology with which this essay began? A first response would point to the intriguing points ofconnection between seemingly disparate traditions, particularly in the ways they correlatehistory, theology (broadly understood), and politics. Scholars who have sought to meld thetraditions, bringing the theoretical sophistication of different modes of argumentation to bearon American exceptionalism, have done so in several ways. Turning to recent events,including the wars in Iran and Afghanistan, the Patriot Act, debates about the legality oftorture, and the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, scholars have posed questions aboutthe relationship between the United States and the international community; these worksoften use Schmitt and Agamben to explore the limits to American claims of exceptionalstatus. Political theorists, like Michael Ignatieff, have asked searching questions about theextent that American is willing to abide by the human rights laws and international conven-tions that it helped to establish. Arguing that exceptionalism is too often interpreted as“exemptionalism,” Ignatieff and others seek to hold the United States to the standards itmaintains for other members of the international community, as a way to put human rights,rather than issues of national security, at the center of foreign policy debates (4). Literary



critics have also entered this debate, either focusing, like James Dawes, directly on thecategory of human rights or taking a more general approach, engaging with the literatureof American imperialism, different ways to think about the role of race in American literaryhistory, and the representation of sovereignty.Arguing that American literature is world literature, other scholars have used the revised

approaches to exceptionalism to argue for a different approach to the field entirely, one thatrejects that nation as the primary category of organization. New configurations – hemispheric,transnational, multination, and postnational – have changed the canon, particularly perhaps forscholars working in the area of early American literature, raising intriguing questions about whatcounts as an example or an exception, concerns that Kierkegaard’s writing can help to clarify.While it was formerly the case that John Winthrop’s “A Modell of Christian Charitie” (1630)functioned as the “Ur-text” for American literature (Delbanco, 72), scholars have increasinglyestablished many different foundational texts for American literature, composed in an arrayof languages. Such comparative models are not, Ian Tyrell notes, “necessarily antagonisticto exceptionalism,” however, suggesting that scholars must be alert to the potentiallyimperial aspects of the trans- or postnational project (1035). Donald Pease shares thisconcern, urging scholars to attend to this danger by turning “the state’s exceptions, as wellas the structures through which the discourse of American exceptionalism has historicallydisavowed them, into objects of analysis and explanatory critique” (25).These philosophical considerations of the exception have also been useful for scholars in

reframing a variety of problems, from the structure of sovereignty to the status of theeveryday. Questions about how we might understand the dynamic relationship the normalor usual and the exceptional or extraordinary can have profound implications not just withinliterary texts but also understanding the relationship between works and relative to thecommunity for which they are written. As Jonathan Elmer argues, American “textualtraditions” help to reveal how the “problem of sovereignty. . .unfolds in the new world”;literary expression, he maintains, provides Thomas Jefferson with the means to express, notavoid, “conceptual problems” (7).“Myths normally do the work of incorporating events into recognizable national

narratives,” Pease explains, and American exceptionalism has been a remarkably successfulmyth (15). But the new thinking on exceptionalism seeks to do the opposite: to distortthe comfortable recognition that myth provides, to startle people out of complacency andinto action, and to provide a new way of thinking about the human experience that is notlimited to or by the nation.

Short Biography

Elizabeth Duquette is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at GettysburgCollege. She is the author of Loyal Subjects: Bonds of Nation, Race, and Allegiance (RutgersUP, 2010), as well as articles on Herman Melville, Henry James, Edgar Allan Poe, HarrietBeecher Stowe, among others. She recently edited, with Cheryl Tevlin, a volume entitledElizabeth Stuart Phelps: Selected Tales, Essays, and Poems (forthcoming from Universityof Nebraska Press), and is currently writing a book entitled Example, Exemplar, Exception:Representation and Identification in Nineteenth-Century America.

Notes

* Correspondence: Department of English, 300 N. Washington Street, Gettysburg, PA 17325, USA. Email:[email protected]



1 Scholars struggle to differentiate between ideology and myth, both in terms of larger intellectual debates as well as inthe more limited topic of American exceptionalism. Rather than worrying about the differences between the terms;however, this essay will focus on the terrain they share, particularly the ways that both myth and ideology mystifypower relations.2 The literature on this topic is vast; some key titles include J. G. A. Pocock, “Time, Institutions and Action: An Essayon Tradition and their Understanding,” Politics, Langauge and Time (New York: Atheneum, 1973); Benedict Anderson,Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 1991); RogersSmith, Stories of Peoplehood: The Politics and Morals of Political Membership (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003);and Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory.3 Greene is particularly useful for readers interested in early expressions of proto-exceptionalist thinking.4 Lipset, for example, reads the passage as suggesting that the United States is “qualitatively different from all othercountries”; for this reason, he thinks Tocqueville should therefore be called “the initiator of the writings on Americanexceptionalism” (18).5 J. Robert Alexander outlines the details of Stalin’s condemnation of the Lovestoneites in The Right Opposition: TheLovestoneites and the International Communist Opposition of the 1930s (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1981). See, also, Pease2009, 10.6 It would be wrong to assume that there was no critical dimension to the study of American literature and cultureduring the period. Trachtenberg details the ways in which the “myth/symbol” school offered its own critique(“Myth and Symbol,” Massachusetts Review 25 (Winter 1984), 670–1).7 Special issues of Diacritics (summer-fall 2007) and South Atlantic Quarterly (winter 2008) offer excellent sustainedconsideration of the exception, Schmitt, and Agamben.8 On the influence of the Catholic Church on Schmitt’s ideas, see Samuel Weber, Targets of Opportunity: On theMilitarization of Thinking. Fordham, NY: Fordham University Press, 2005.9 Benjamin wrote to Schmitt in 1930, suggesting that he had found “confirmation of [his] modes of research in thephilosophy of art from [Schmitt’s] in the philosophy of the state” (cited Weber, 5).10 These books, some not yet translated from the Italian, are State of Exception, Homo Sacer II (2003), Remnants ofAuschwitz, Homo Sacer III (1998), Il Regno e la Gloria, Homo Sacer II, 2 (2007), and The Sacrament of Language: AnArchaeology of the Oath, Homo Sacer II, 3 (2011).

Works Cited

Agamben, Giorgio.Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998.——. State of Exception. Trans. Kevin Attell. Chicago: Chicago UP, 2005.Bender, Thomas. A Nation Among Nations: America’s Place in World History. New York: Hill and Wang, 2006.Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968.Cassirer, Ernst. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: Mythical Thought (Vol. II). Trans. Ralph Manheim. New Haven: YaleUP, 1955.

Davis, Allen F. The Politics of American Studies. American Quarterly 42.3 (1990): 353–74.Delbanco, Andrew. The Puritan Ordeal. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991.Denning, Michael. ‘The Special American Conditions’: Marxism and American Studies. American Quarterly 38.3 (1986):356–80.

Elmer, Jonathan. On Lingering and Being Last: Race and Sovereignty in the New World. New York: Fordham UP, 2008.Greene, Jack. Intellectual Construction of America: Exceptionalism and Identity from 1492 to 1800. Chapel Hill: NorthCarolina UP, 1993.

Ed. Ignatieff, Michael. American Exceptionalism and Human Rights. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005.Kammen, Michael.Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture. New York: Vintage, 1991.Kierkegaard, Søren. Fear and Trembling; Repetition. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: PrincetonUP, 1983.

Lipset, George. American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword. New York: Norton, 1996.Pease, Donald. Re-thinking “American Studies After US Exceptionalism”. American Literary History 21.1 (2008): 19–27.——. The New American Exceptionalism. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2009.Rodgers, Daniel T. ‘Exceptionalism.’ Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past. Eds. Anthony Molho andGordon S. Wood. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998. 21–40.

Ross, Dorothy. ‘American Exceptionalism.’ A Companion to American Thought. Eds. Richard W. Fox andJames T. Kloppenberg. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. 22–3.

Schmitt, Carl. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Trans. George Schwab. Chicago: ChicagoUP, 1985.



——. The Concept of the Political. Trans. George Schwab. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1996.Sklar, Robert. The Problem of an American Studies ‘Philosophy’: A Bibliography of New Directions. American Quarterly27 (1975): 245–62.

Tocqueville, Alexis. Democracy in America. 2 vols. Trans. Henry Reeve and Francis Bowen. New York: Vintage, 1990.Tyrell, Ian. American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History. American Historical Review 96.4 (1991). 1031–55.Turner, Frederick Jackson. ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History.’ An American Primer. Ed.Daniel J. Boorstin. New York: Meridian, 1966. 542–70.

Weber, Samuel. “Taking Exception to Decision” Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt. Diacritics 22.3-.4 (1992): 5–18.Zizek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real. New York: Verso, 2002.

Further Reading

Hodgson, Godfrey. The Myth of American Exceptionalism. New Haven: Yale UP, 2009.Kammen, Michael. The Problem of American Exceptionalism: A Reconsideration. American Quarterly 45 (1993): 1–43.Madsen, Deborah. American Exceptionalism. Jackson, MI: Mississippi UP, 1998.Murphy, Gretchen. Hemispheric Imaginings: The Monroe Doctrine and Narratives of U.S. Empire. Durham: Duke UP, 2005.Noble, David W. Death of a Nation: American Culture and the End of Exceptionalism. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2002.


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